by James Morrow
“Do you know who I am?” Gerard asked the sentry. “Sa chi sono?”
“I’ve never seen you before.”
“I’m Gerard Korty, the master builder, and I’ve been looking for you my whole life.”
“Signor Korty? Aren’t you in Sri Lanka?”
“Indonesia, but now the West beckons, as does your amazing countenance.”
“Non capisco.”
“Your face, sir, your magnifica faccia. I am presently laying plans to sculpt the Inferno, and I swear you are the Virgil I’ve been seeking all these years. I must have your face in my sketchbook. Can you come to my hotel this evening? I shall pay you two hundred thousand lire per hour.”
“I’m busy tonight,” said the sentry, cautious but interested.
“Tomorrow night?”
“This is molto flattering.”
“So rarely does an artist find a model who perfectly matches the ideal in his imagination. What may I call you?”
“Stefano Degani.”
“My dear Stefano,” said Gerard, shaking the sentry’s hand, “I am thrilled to be working with you.” He flourished the bushing chisel. “Right now I must add a few wrinkles to Erasmus, but then we’ll continue this discussion. A productive sitting always begins with a well-fed model. Have you a favorite ristorante?”
“I’m not supposed to let anyone inside.”
Gerard placed his hand on the lintel and pushed. The gate pivoted soundlessly. “I understand, but Erasmus needs his wrinkles, a direct request from the Holy Father.” He squeezed through the breach. “I won’t be long. Quindici minuti.”
“I’ve never eaten at Grappolo d’Oro—do you know it? In the Piazza della Cancelleria?”
“Grappolo d’Oro! Eccellente!”
Gerard marched forward ten steps, stooped down, and ducked under the nearest tarpaulin like a child sneaking into a circus tent. A steamy, suffocating darkness enclosed him. His sinuses throbbed with the sickly sweet fragrance of the canvas. Slowly but reliably his rods and cones got to work, adjusting his eyes to the gloom. He was standing before the Temple of Doubt His basic design, while hardly revolutionary (a circle of Ionian columns on the outside, a domed rotunda within), had been followed precisely. Here and there, a shaft of sunlight exploited the gap between adjacent tarpaulins, imparting a phosphorescent luster to the white marble. He entered.
There was no statue of Erasmus in the Temple of Doubt no bust of Hume or Voltaire—not a single molecule of skepticism, in feet. The building was actually a monument to Augustine of Hippo Regius, his enormous smile and poached-egg eyes beaming down from a pedestal.
“Shit.”
He left the Augustine shrine and proceeded to the putative Temple of Kindness, where his dismay quickly crystallized into rage. Once again, the contractors had cleaved to Gerard’s outward scheme—a rectilinear hall supported by caryatides of female saints—but inside, Ockham’s little myth of kindness was nowhere to be found. It took Gerard only a minute to realize that the building celebrated not decency but Saint Thomas Aquinas.
The pattern continued with the gelded Temple of Creativity and the gutless Temple of Knowledge: stone paeans to Paul of Tarsus and Francis of Assisi, respectively. Gerard stormed toward the hub. He no longer expected a bronze brain, but he was wholly unprepared for the architectural monstrosity that now reared up before him. Twice the size of Chartres Cathedral, it could fairly claim to fuse, in a single building, all the worst features of the West’s major architectural movements; it had the luridness of the Romanesque, the clutter of the Gothic, the turgidity of the Renaissance, the decadence of the Baroque, the chaos of the rococo, and the aridity of the modem. The materials were likewise a hodgepodge—metal, stone, glass, and wood thrown together with no thought to harmonizing their textures and tones. But the unkindest cut was the steel plaque set prominently in the south wall. RELIQUARY DESIGNED BY GERARD W. KORTY, “THE MODERN MICHELANGELO,” A.D. 2003.
Retrieving his carving hammer from the rucksack, he placed the chisel against the raised K in KORTY. He struck the handle. The blade ricocheted, thwarted by the steel. Again he struck, and again—no effect. Hardly a surprise, but at least he’d tried.
He mounted the steps, passed through a pair of bas-relief bronze doors—Pentateuch episodes on the left, Gospel scenes on the right—and entered the vestibule. Hunting around, he spotted a cluster of switches behind a Korty Madonna, then activated them en masse. A blue-white glow flooded the reliquary, highlighting an immense corridor flanked by marble statues of dead popes. He held his breath and gaped.
An informative granite tablet lay embedded in the floor. Selected segments from 184 different bones were on view here, the inscription explained, the Creator’s natural complement minus the twenty-two components of His skull, one bone entrusted to each of the 184 Holy Fathers who had ruled the temporal Church between A.D. 682 and A.D. 1963, beginning with Saint Leo II and ending with John XXIII, excluding pretenders to the throne and otherwise illegitimate claimants. Gerard proceeded slowly, woozily, stunned by the epic vulgarity of it all. Boniface VI held a piece of God’s sternum on his lap. Sergius III protected a shard of divine clavicle. Gregory IV guarded a fragment of holy scapula. Celestine II kept watch over a portion of sacred sacrum. And so it went, pope after pope, bone after bone. The overall impression was manifestly unintended. These 184 statues did not suggest vicars of Christ so much as members of some highly exclusive kennel club, each about to throw his dog a bone.
Gerard could take no more. Howling with dismay, he spun around and sprinted through the bronze doors. He quit the hideous building, circumvented Augustine’s shrine, and crawled back under the canvas.
“Erasmus now has his wrinkles?” asked Stefano Degani as Gerard emerged into the sunlight.
“Erasmus isn’t in there,” moaned Gerard, clutching his chest “It’s nothing but a lot of popes!”
“That’s not what you wanted?”
“One hundred and eighty-four popes, and there’d be twenty-two more if His skull hadn’t gone into orbit!”
“What time shall I come to Grappolo d’Oro?”
“What’re you talking about?!”
“Dinner tomorrow night at Grappolo d’Oro. After that you’re going to sketch me.”
“I’ve been betrayed, Stefano!” wailed Gerard, starting away. “My child has been tortured and killed”—he ran toward the Via Federico Fellini, screaming like a madman—“and Rome has not heard the last of it!”
When not telling stupid jokes or explaining how I’ll soon be “covered with hideous boils,” Quincy tries convincing me that death is a good thing. Without death, he says, there wouldn’t be enough room on Earth for all the people. (I answer that maybe we could colonize the rest of the solar system.) Death gives life “its edge.” (I tell him that magic tricks, Roger Corman videos, and the time I saw my cousin Cindy’s tits give my life its edge.) Death allows each generation to “overthrow the dictatorship of tradition.” (So why not just make it illegal for anybody over eighty to express an opinion?)
Only one of Quincy’s points impresses me.
“For more than a billion years,” he says, “life on this planet knew a kind of immortality. The bacteria, algae, amoebas, and primitive worms enjoyed ceaseless existence: a growing at one end, a sloughing off at the other, but nothing you would call death. Then, half a billion years ago, sexual reproduction came on the scene, along with its faithful handmaiden, death. The invention of death made possible the individual, in all his astonishing variety. Death broke life free of immortality’s chains. Death said, ‘Let there be sponges and coral, cockles and mussels, jawless fishes and duck-billed dinosaurs.’ And there were sponges and coral, cockles and mussels, jawless fishes and duck-billed dinosaurs. Which shall it be, Kevin? Your individual identity, or the pre-Cambrian algae beds?”
I have no idea how to answer a question like that.
The instant Gerard realized that his watercolors would register vividly on television, he knew exactly h
ow his counterattack would unfold. Hunched over his hotel bed, he arranged the five 24" × 36" images—products of his weeklong creative orgy on Viatikara—atop the blanket and gleefully pictured them entering the homes of every CNN viewer from Helsinki to Honolulu. In a mere fourteen hours the Western world would learn of the Holy See’s knavery.
Sleep was out of the question. His blood boiled. His brain raced. He rode the elevator down to the lobby and strode out of the Abruzzi into the sultry Roman night. It was 11:45 P.M., but the city still rumbled, rattled, and honked as usual, hundreds of motorists zooming around the Colosseum and along the Via di San Gregorio.
Walking past the Arch of Constantine, Gerard noticed to his surprise that the eastern gate of the Forum Romanum lay open. The aberration beckoned. For the second time that day he entered a forbidden space, moving east along the Via Nova until he reached the House of the Vestals. It was his favorite place in the Forum. Nothing much remained—a few crumbling masonry walls facing a courtyard bordered by eight female statues in varying stages of dissolution—but the whole idea of vestal virgins fascinated him.
The Cranium Dei shone down, showering the elite maidens with a preternatural light. Gerard paused before the sole statue that had a head. What was it like, really, to be a vestal? The perks included good food, fine wine, immunity from sexual harassment, and the run of a comfortable palace. Still, the average Roman virgin experienced profound anxiety when the Pontifex Maximus tapped her for the honor. If a vestal allowed the hearth goddess’s sacred fire to die, the palace guards would scourge her. If she lost her chastity, they would bury her alive.
A male voice said, “Buona sera.”
“Buona sera,” Gerard responded automatically. His intestines tightened. Rome after dark was a treacherous place. What pernicious imp had prompted him to wander so far from the Abruzzi? “E una bella serata.”
Gerard edged toward the Temple of Vesta, a rotund, columned building reminiscent of the Augustine shrine at Cinecittà. A tall man stood in the entrance, dressed in a white trench coat, his face cloaked in shadows, his teeth clenching an unlit clay pipe.
“Yes, Gerard, it’s a beautiful night.”
“How do you know my name?”
“Your name is the least significant thing I know about you. Ah, bene—I’ve aroused your curiosity. Return to the House of the Vestals. I shall join you momentarily. Do you see the seated maiden, the one who’s nothing but a torso with legs? Look at her inscription. Tell me what you see.”
Gerard was divided, as if a chisel had been driven through his sternum, splitting his heart. Half of him wanted to flee before this stranger pulled a gun, but his other half sensed that by continuing the encounter he would eventually learn what Fiona liked to call “a piece of the truth.”
He did as instructed, approaching the marble torso and reading her pedestal.
“It says 9 June 364 A.D.,” Gerard reported.
“What else?”
“There’s a letter C. The rest is gone.”
“Deliberately erased. C for Claudia. An illuminating story. In the fourth century, a vestal named Claudia foreswore the sacred fire to enter the Convent of Lorenzo. Naturally the Catholic Church was pleased, but they hated the idea of Claudia’s pagan past, so one night some bishops snuck into the Forum and rubbed out the last six letters on her monument. Cheer up, Gerard. Long before they got their hands on your reliquary, the Holy See was mutilating art in the name of piety. Don’t take it personally.”
“You’ve been to Cinecittà?”
“It’s terrible what they did to your brainchild.” The intruder climbed down from the Temple of Vesta. He struck a match and touched it to his pipe, sucking the bright orange flame into the bowl. “I know that nothing can keep you from appearing at the grand opening tomorrow, but I’ll give you my advice anyway. Go back to New York.”
“You’re right,” said Gerard, dumbfounded. “I was planning to crash the ceremony.”
As the intruder drew nearer, the divine skull bathed him in a silvery radiance. A tremor passed through Gerard, head to toe. The man’s features were the most disturbing he’d ever seen, shocking not in their strangeness but in their familiarity: this was his face—a white, withered facsimile of his face, rather, as if he’d carved his own portrait in marble and then submerged the bust in acid.
“You look like me,” said Gerard, aghast.
“Who did you expect your death to look like, Winston Churchill?”
“My death?” sputtered Gerard. “What do you mean, my death? If you’re advising me not to attend the opening, okay, fine, but please remove that ridiculous mask.”
“It’s no mask,” said the doppelgänger, puffing on his pipe. “I am your personal wraith, Gerard, your reliable leveler, your devoted fetch, so naturally I wear your face. Call me Julius Azrael. You don’t have to like me, but you will acknowledge me, much as an honest fornicator will acknowledge his bastard son.” Nonchalantly he lifted a stiletto from the pocket of his trench coat. “The fetches are coming, millions of us, spawn of the holy skull. Fetches dancing in the Forum, swimming through the Tiber, hiding under your bed. We are the children of Nietzsche and the vectors of nihilism, and as surely as rats carry Pasteurella pestis, we bring a plague of death awareness and a contagion of malignant despair.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“A perfectly rational response. Which I shall address with the following rational assault.”
Before Gerard knew what was happening, Julius Azrael had rushed forward, stiletto in hand, and opened the sculptors left cheek. The cut was shallow but long.
“Damn you.”
“I didn’t enjoy that. My species abhors violence.”
As Gerard slapped a hand over the stinging wound, the doppelgänger turned and walked through the shadowy rubble that had once been the Domus Publica.
“Tomorrow, believe it or not, you’ll be glad for that cut,” Julius Azrael called from the darkness cloaking the Via Sacra. “It will tell you that you haven’t gone mad.”
The boils have come, red and dripping, just as Quincy predicted. They aren’t painful, but they’re really ugly. Head to toe, my skin looks like a relief map of a volcanic island.
Whenever I ask Quincy how long this stage will last, he tells me a death joke instead of answering. He knows a million of them.
“Mr. Fitzpatrick is lying in bed, mortally ill, when the enticing fragrance of stew reaches his nostrils. He calls to his daughter. ‘Katy, ask your mother if I could have a bowl of that tasty stew.’ Katy goes to the kitchen and soon returns empty-handed. ‘Mother says you can’t have any,’ she explains. ‘We’re saving it for the wake.’”
Not funny, but I laugh anyway. A boy in my condition needs all the chuckles he can get.
Riding the metro that morning, the rolled-up watercolors balanced on his knees, Gerard pondered the previous night’s doppelgänger. A hallucination, quite possibly. Except the hallucination had slashed his cheek. A ghost, then? He didn’t believe in ghosts. A psychotic episode? No, the sine qua non of insanity was the victim’s inability to consider that he might be crazy.
When the Cinecittà stop arrived, Gerard tucked the watercolors under his arm, detrained, and climbed the stairs to street level. It was early, 8:45 P.M. by Gerard’s watch, but thousands thronged the Via Federico Fellini, a raging torrent of citizens, tourists, clerics, laymen, pilgrims, and thrill seekers pushing toward the Ben-Hur quarry. He approached the nearest pavilion, its shelves overflowing with bumper stickers announcing I’ve Seen the Bones, T-shirts declaring Citizen of the Third Millennium, and a matched set of plaster apostles clustered like tenpins awaiting the arrival of a bowling ball. For 27,000 lire he obtained a cappuccino, a chocolate croissant, and a souvenir program book, its cover emblazoned with the Cranium Dei and the words Cinecittà Reliquary Dedication Ceremony.
The polizia were out in force, channeling the crowds away from the speaker’s platform and into the quarry. Occasionally a person of co
nsequence broke free and, flourishing a silver-foil ticket, demanded to be seated in the open-air theater. Although the program book specified an 11:00 A.M. commencement, half the chairs were already taken. The average, uncredentialed visitor was obliged to bypass the theater and walk down an avenue of sawhorse barriers toward the reliquary.
The temple complex was fully exposed, fence gone, grounds accessible, buildings bare. Flower gardens bloomed everywhere, an amenity Gerard had missed the day before, a crazy quilt of tulips, hyacinths, and lilies. Lit by the rising sun and its attendant skull, the reliquary proper looked more hideous than ever, an architectural enormity whose only value, he thought, might lie in persuading imperialist aliens that this wasn’t a civilization worth conquering. The four shrines were locked up tight, as was the central abomination, but the visitors didn’t mind. About half of them strolled around the reliquary, trying to decide whether this was postmodernism or merely idiocy, while the other half spread out picnic blankets and began devouring their caches of wine, cheese, and fruit. The sounds of the photojournalists’ cameras filled the air, a cacophony of clicks and whirrs.
Gerard sat on the reliquary steps, thereby sparing himself a view of the goddamn thing, and leafed through his program book. The morning’s schedule of events confirmed a rumor he’d heard back in Manhattan: the American Baptist Confederation had sold the bones to Rome on condition that Protestantism receive significant musical representation during the dedication ceremony.
11:00 A.M.
Highlights from “The Magnificat”
by Johann Sebastian Bach
performed by the Vienna Boys Choir
11:15 A.M.
Benediction
delivered by His Eminence, Tullio Cardinal Di Luca
Secretary of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs
